Deregulation is fine if you strengthen the ability of citizens to obtain redress through the judicial system. If you weaken that ability, or it is weakened, you increase regulation.
But they're both deregulating and restricting judicial redress, which only increases power of those who don't need it.
Companies either are liable or not; these clauses preventing class action lawsuits seem baseless to me.
So no longer can they even claim to be anti government corruption & spending, and pro business & 'freedom.' They just appear to be 'anti people.'
But please don't pretend the Dems are a whole lot better on most of these issues... I really hope our generation can work together and do something about this failing two-party system.
*a short list: domestic surveillance, police militarization, civil forfeiture, anti net netruality, military expansion, pro Wall St, hand outs to healthcare lobbysits, etc..
Correction: anti-poor people.
Correction: anti-middle class people. They can't extract any money from the poor, and clearly not from the rich, so guess who's left?
Paying attention and voting accordingly is a pretty good solution. Unfortunately, almost no one does that (and it tends to be even worse at the local level).
They are, and people can demand they be better still.
I'd go even further and say corrupt and evil. Yet these baseless clauses have been around long before the modern GOP, so while I agree with your sentiment, I'd broaden it from "GOP" to "greedy corporates and their government puppets from any political party."
[0] And yes, most did it for political reasons I imagine.
It's not about the issue.
Don't they also get used for cases where (spitballing here) half a town gets cancer because the chemical plant in the area has been illegal dumping their effluents next door?
The logic is this: "Look, you just need to add this handful of lines to your agreement, and you've instantly got protection against money-grubbing, ambulance-chasing lawyers who would come after you because you misplaced a parenthesis. The cost is nearly zero, because nobody reads those contracts anyway, and anybody who makes a stink about it is probably one of those money-grubbing, sue-happy customers you don't want, anyway."
So, yeah. I get it. I hate it, but I get it. To change it is going to require a consumer backlash large enough to impact congress -- not just the CFPB. But consumers aren't making enough noise, because of course, nobody reads those contracts anyway...
But as an investor in the same company, I would fault them for not taking a simple step to protect their profits. Just because you include the clause doesn't mean that you're going to do evil and exercise it. Again, I can't fault you for taking the get-out-of-jail-free card that's offered. But I fault you mightily for doing something that would require flashing that card.
The fact that the card exists at all seems like the root problem to be fixed.
And I disagree. Including the clause indicates your willingness to be evil in exercising it.
The fact that the card exists is absolutely a problem that exists and needs to be fixed. But you had the option to take it or not, and you chose to take it. That in itself is an evil step.
You can and should. So should I. If consumers refused to sign they wouldn't put them in.
Unfortunately we don't live in a world that allows us to easily do that (unless you want to live without a phone, internet, a car, etc...). So that's why the government needs to step in. It doesn't make these companies any less scummy for using the clause.
So surely you're just as angry about the Democrats deregulating the telecoms in 1996 and allowing companies to own entire vertical chains. (Comcast owns everything from the News, to the pipe you get it from. Ever notice how they never mention "big corporations are killing America" anymore?)
The GOP hates you. The Democrats _pretend_ not to. If that weren't the case, you'd think 8 years under Obama and near-universal public support behind him... things would have actually you know... gotten better.
Too bad they were too busy letting Wall Street destroy the economy without jailtime, giving guns to Mexican cartels, spying on and threatening journalists, drone strikes on US citizens, unprecedented exponential growth in classified documents (cover my ass, anyone?), using the IRS as a political wing, and hunting down and smearing both Snowden and Julian Assange. (Props for the ACA, though. Except that also had no provision to stop healthcare insurance companies rapidly increasing, insane prices that make even ACA plans unaffordable to poor people--I would know. Minimum of $350 a month isn't a viable healthcare plan, as it continues to rise ~10% a year. But fixing pre-existing conditions was About Damn Time(TM), so again, props to them.)
p.s. I voted for Obama, so yeah, I do get to bitch about the disparity between what he said, and what he did.
Things did get better under Obama, in many ways. To pretend otherwise by focusing on areas that didn't get better is again unreasonable. Things are getting dramatically, markedly worse under a president who is essentially pushing standard-issue GOP agenda items. This article alone is evidence of that. Little effort need be expended for more examples.
And, for what it's worth, I'm not a straight-ticket voter.
*Edited for tone.
The 2007-8 crash was somewhat before Obama's time.
> giving guns to Mexican cartels
Started under Bush.
> spying on and threatening journalists
Started decades before Obama.
> unprecendented exponetial growth in classified documents
That needs a citation.
> using the IRS as a political wing
Unless I'm reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy wrong, this was a natural (and requested) response to Citizens United and Republicans abusing 501(c)(4) entities.
> hunting down and smearing [...] Julian Assange
It is extremely difficult to smear a neo-nazi misogynist more than he already does by his own words.
Not the jailtime, and not the Obama negotiations with Wall Street. Do you ever watch Frontline... or Google?
>Started under Bush.
Misnomer. It started under bush, and a second, LARGER program started under Obama. Google it.
>Started decades before Obama.
Wrong. Look up the unprecedented demands of Obama for news companies to reveal their anon sources.
>That needs a citation.
God damn, have you ever heard of Google? Or are you just afraid of finding out something?
https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/classified.png
> neo-nazi misogynist
As usual, use a character attack when you don't have the logic to win.
You can really tell when someone's ego is on the line when they refuse to even check your facts before attempting to refute them with "I haven't seen it, so it must be wrong."
I think Assange is a self-serving hypocrite, but calling him that seems pretty extreme.
Looks like that was a bi-partisan effort, but with more Democrats opposing it than Republicans. Senators who voted for the act: 51 Republicans, 30 Democrats. Senators opposed: 2 Republicans, 16 Democrats (one Republican senator didn't vote).[1]
House members who voted for the act: 236 Republicans, 178 Democrats. House members opposed: 0 Republicans, 15 Democrats (four Democratic house members didn't vote).[2]
[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1995/s268 [2] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/104-1996/h25
While I understand this sentiment, you have to understand that it is also necessary to try and inspire people even if you know that you probably won't get everything you want to get done. You can hope that people will act intelligently in their own self-interest and know that you are the best candidate for them, but in reality I don't think that is enough, you have to inspire people and work their emotions. It is manipulative but also, unfortunately, necessary. Given what Obama had on his plate and a totally oppositional congress for the most part, we can't really complain. He tried to be bipartisan and it was a waste of effort for the most part, yeah he could have been better in theory but in reality I'm not so sure.